GENEVA--Iran and major powers agreed on Tuesday to meet again next month in their dispute over Tehran's nuclear programme, but the chief Iranian negotiator said there could be no discussion of any halt to uranium enrichment.
The agreement to reconvene in Turkey in late January, after two days of talks in Geneva this week, was as much as either side had expected from their first meeting in over a year on the intractable nuclear issue.
Iran has insisted all along that it has the right to enrich uranium for peaceful electricity generation and will never give into pressure and abandon that right. Iran had also said it would not discuss enrichment in Geneva, but Western diplomats said a range of issues including the nuclear dispute were tackled at this week's talks.
"I am announcing openly and clearly that Iran will not discuss a uranium enrichment halt in the next meeting in Istanbul with major powers," chief Iranian negotiator Saeed Jalili told a news conference. Iran rejects Western suspicions that its nuclear programme is a cover for acquiring an atomic bomb.
The enrichment issue remains the major obstacle to resolving a dispute which has the potential to ignite a major conflict in the Middle East. Enriched uranium can be used both in power stations and, when refined to a much higher degree, in nuclear bombs.
Repeated U.N. Security Council resolutions demand Iran suspend enrichment and allow tougher U.N. inspections of its atomic work as a way of convincing the world it is not secretly trying to develop a nuclear weapons capability. That demand remains the position of the six powers, a senior U.S. administration official said in Geneva after the talks, which he described as "difficult and candid".
The U.S. official, who asked not to be named, said the United States did not have a formal bilateral meeting with Iran, but had had opportunities to communicate its main points. "We had several informal interactions which were useful to reinforce our main concerns," the official told reporters.
A revised version of a nuclear fuel swap, agreed and then later rejected by Iran last year, could be a way to build confidence between the two sides, the official said.
But analysts say Iran's hardline leaders, who use the nuclear programme to rally nationalist support and distract from domestic problems, are unlikely ever to agree to back down on the main issue of enrichment. "This government has obviously linked the development of the nuclear programme so closely to its own legitimacy that it would be difficult for them to backtrack on it," said Gala Riani of the IHS Global Insight consultancy.